ed, he was displeased. And reading over the articles
himself, disliked them as running in a Romish style, and making no
distinction of persons. Which caused him to write in some earnestness to
the archbishop, and in his letter he told him, that he found these
articles so curiously penned, so full of branches and circumstances, as
he thought the inquisitors of Spain used not so many questions to
comprehend and to trap their preys. And that this juridical and
canonical sifting of poor ministers was not to edify and reform. And
that in charity he thought, they ought not to answer to all these nice
points, except they were very notorious offenders in papistry or heresy:
Begging his grace to bear with that one fault, if it were so, that he
had willed these ministers not to answer those articles, except their
consciences might suffer them[94]."

[Note 94: "Life of Whitgift" by Strype.]

The archbishop, in a long and labored answer, expressed his surprise at
his lordship's "vehement speeches" against the administering of
interrogatories, "seeing it was the ordinary course in other courts: as
in the star-chamber, in the courts of the marches, and in other places:"
and he advanced many arguments, or assertions, in defence of his
proceedings, none of which proved satisfactory to the lord treasurer, as
appeared by his reply. In the end, the archbishop found himself obliged
to compromise this dispute by engaging that in future the twenty-four
articles should only be administered to students in divinity previously
to their ordination; and not to ministers already settled in cures,
unless they should have openly declared themselves against the
church-government by law established. But this instance of concession
extorted by the urgency of Walsingham appears to have been a solitary
one; the high commission, with the archbishop at its head, proceeded
unrelentingly in the work of establishing conformity, and crushing with
a strong hand all appeals to the sense of the public on controverted
points of discipline or doctrine. The queen, vehemently prepossessed
with the idea that the opposers of episcopacy must ever be ill affected
also to monarchy, made no scruple of declaring, after some years
experience of the untameable spirit of the sect, that the puritans were
greater enemies of hers than the papists; and in the midst of her
greatest perils from the machinations of the latter sect, she seldom
judged it necessary to conciliate by indu